Avant Garde Quotes

A major assumption that underlies this selection is that it is only within work that is progressive, experimental or avant-garde that staid, old-fashioned images and ideas about gender can be challenged and alternatives imagined. I have never seen a ballet performance that has not disappointed me.

O masses, o masses! When will you assume the image and likeness of your avant-garde?

Andrei Platonov

If my work is accepted, I must move on to the point where it is not.

John Cage

As a child, my clothes were always tailored to be oversized, because I quickly outgrew them and then needed bigger ones. As an adult, I still don't cut my coat according to size

Huh. Well you and I just disagree. Maybe the world just feels differently to us. This is all going back to something that isn't really clear: that avant-garde stuff is hard to read. I'm not defending it, I'm saying that stuff - this is gonna get very abstract - but there's a certain set of magical stuff that fiction can do for us. There's maybe thirteen things, of which who even knows which ones we can talk about. But one of them has to do with the sense of, the sense of capturing, capturing what the world feels like to us, in the sort of way that I think that a reader can tell "Another sensibility like mine exists." Something else feels this way to someone else. So that the reader feels less lonely.

David Foster Wallace

The word "avant-garde," for example, despite its note of impartiality, generally serves to dismiss-as though by a shrug of the shoulders-any work that risks giving a bad conscience to the literature of mass consumption.

Alain Robbe-Grillet

It is not possible to be original by trying to be original - those who attempt this in the arts will be merely avant-garde. Originality is the product of an impulse to intense and overwhelming that it bursts the conventions and produces something new - again more by accident than design.

Why can't a tree be called Pluplusch?

Hugo Ball

Everybody was sorta going to sleep twards the end of 1983, and I felt that they had to be woken up!

Morrissey

What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant-garde had in 1890? Ebullience, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore, and above all the sense that art, in the most disinterested and noble way, could find the necessary metaphors by which a radically changing culture could be explained to its inhabitants.

I have nothing but a great head to offer.Is that enough?

If I were a bird, I will have no feet.

Pain is our salvation 'cos when it's dark enough, a star will reveal itself.

Someone is always feeding fat off everything you don't know.

The idea that sins can be forgiven is at the root of mankind's problems. Everyone pays...sooner or later.

The more you worry about your spending, the less you focus on increasing your capacity.

May success chase and find you as you work hard.

Cleverness in itself is useless. It’s like a peacock’s feathers – an extravagant display used by those who crave attention.The mind’s worth is revealed when clever solves real problems.